ontinued--while
the soldier flounders and staggers about in that awful, sucking swamp,
the pessimist at home will lean back in his arm-chair and wonder, as he
watches the smoke from his cigar wind up towards the ceiling, why we do
not advance at the rate of one mile an hour, why we are not in Berlin,
and whether our army is any good at all. If such a man would know why we
are not in German territory, let him walk, on a dark night, through the
village duck-pond, and then sleep in his wet clothes in the middle of
the farmyard. He would still be ignorant of mud and wet, but he would
cease to wonder and grumble.

It is the infantryman who suffers most, for he has to live, eat, sleep,
and work in the mud. The plain of dragging slime that stretches from
Switzerland to the sea is far worse to face than the fire of machine
guns or the great black trench-mortar bombs that come twisting down
through the air. It is more terrible than the frost and the rain--you
cannot even stamp your feet to drive away the insidious chill that mud
always brings. Nothing can keep it from your hands and face and clothes;
there is no taking off your boots to dry in the trenches--you must lie
down just as you are, and often you are lucky if you have two empty
sandbags under you to save you from the cold embrace of the swamp.

But if the mud stretch is desolate by day, it is shocking by night.
Imagine a battalion going up to the trenches to relieve another
regiment. The rain comes beating pitilessly down on the long trail of
men who stumble along in the blackness over the _pave_. They are all
well loaded, for besides his pack, rifle, and equipment, each man
carries a pick or a bag of rations or a bundle of firewood. At every
moment comes down the line the cry to "keep to the right," and the whole
column stumbles off the _pave_ into the deep mud by the roadside to
allow the passage of an ambulance or a transport waggon. There is no
smoking, for they are too close to the enemy, and there is the thought
of six days and six nights of watchfulness and wetness in the trenches.

Presently the winding line strikes off the road across the mud. This is
not mud such as we know it in England--it is incredibly slippery and
impossibly tenacious, and each dragging footstep calls for a tremendous
effort. The men straggle, or close up together so that they have hardly
the room to move; they slip, and knock into each other, and curse; they
are hindered by little ditch